A Carnegie Mellon study shows that pedestrian deaths increase almost 200% when daylight saving time ends.
It’s not the darkness itself, but the adjustment to earlier nighttime that’s the killer, said professors Paul Fischbeck and David Gerard, both of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
. . .
Fischbeck and Gerard conducted a preliminary study of seven years of federal traffic fatalities and calculated risk per mile walked for pedestrians. They found that per-mile risk jumps 186 percent from October to November, but then drops 21 percent in December.
They said the drop-off by December indicates the risk is caused by the trouble both drivers and pedestrians have adjusting when darkness suddenly comes an hour earlier.
. . .
The reverse happens in the morning when clocks are set back and daylight comes earlier. Pedestrian risk plummets, but there are fewer walkers then, too. The 13 lives saved at 6 a.m. don’t offset the 37 lost at 6 p.m., the researchers found.
A few times in high school and college English classes we were to write persuasive essays on topics of our choosing. My pet issues were the electoral college and daylight saving time. In both cases the teachers would tell me something like “Is this really important?” or “Can anyone really have strong feelings about this?”. I like to think that studies like this and the last few elections prove my pet persuasive points’ relevance.
We must be on the same page. Those are two of the major things that tick me off.
The problem with this study is that it can be twisted into an argument for year round DST. An insurance institute commenting on the study seemed to be taking exactly that approach. Of course, if Congress does that then maybe, just maybe, we can finally get Central Time (with year round daylight saving) across all of Indiana.
From the referenced article “”This clearly shows that both drivers and pedestrians should think about this daylight savings adjustment,” Gerard said. “There are lives at stake.”
Uh, well, maybe they should just think about paying a little more attention, ya think? Once again, let’s blame something else besides ourselves for simply not taking the responsibility to be more careful after dark.
Oops, I forgot….it’s the governments job to make sure I don’t need to be more careful.
Hopefully, we have a more circumspect view of both the private sector and of government after our experience with uncontrolled government in cahoots with the private sector during the last 8 years. For too long government was deemed to be bad only from a conservative point of view because of the ‘liberal, failed programs’ it produced. Now, we can see bad government as liberals see it , impervious to its citizens with democracy short-circuited) Yes,government can be bad from both views as can the private sector.The answer is balance,and that also is hard to define,but whatever this balance is ,it does seem to keep both sides more honest,and that’s an important start.